Just the bear essentials

Just the bear essentials

Just the bear essentials

1/2
Dakota Blue Richards

Battle: Lyra saves her uncle Lord Asriel, played by Daniel Craig

2/2
Nicole Kidman

Suspicious character: Nicole Kidman plays Mrs Coulter

Be warned: those of all ages who adored the first of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights, will see a beautifully visualised skeleton of the novel in writer-director Chris Weitz's adaptation. This film is likely to upset those fans. Which means that giant fantasies such as the Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series that Pullman abhors are probably safe with their box-office records.

Others, though, will be relieved to see that, thanks to Henry Braham's cinematography and Dennis Gassner's production design, The Golden Compass contains in its images much of the essential imagination of the book.

Nor will Pullman's fervent attack on religious fundamentalism, illustrated by the nasty forces of the Magisterium, cause much offence to film-goers since the first book (retitled The Golden Compass in America), doesn't press that particular case and Weitz tones down what there is.

What is wrong with the film lies elsewhere and chiefly in the cutting of the book into cinematic shape so that the author's imaginative intelligence, and his great skill in fashioning it for children as well as adults, is rendered not impotent but hardly as powerful as it is on the page.

You only have to dip into the book to see how the film loses Pullman's detail, and while that was inevitable if we were not going to have a talkative three-hour movie, a brighter screenplay might have helped. Too many directors try to write their own screenplays, and the chances of complete-success are rather less than 50-50. Pullman has intimated that this first part of his trilogy is not so much about magic nor authoritarianism but about a girl who resists the chains of the adult world. Weitz has certainly found a perky heroine in British debutante Dakota Blue Richards - not an absolutely natural actress but more than just a pretty new face.

As 12-year-old Lyra, who watches as Oxford orphans are being kidnapped and then saves her explorer uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), from the poison administered in his favourite booze by Simon McBurney's slimy Magisterium member, she never lets the film down and sometimes even pushes it up a notch.

When she is bundled off to stay with Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman), here a rather cold and immaculately dressy but underwritten figure of suspicion, she realises that there is a pernicious conspiracy to part all children from their daemons, the animal spirits that represent their better natures.

We know that, too, from Derek Jacobi and Christopher Lee's Magisterium bosses. These sinister characters seem genuinely to believe that any methods are justified when it comes to making the children obedient to their authority and therefore content not to probe too deeply into the dangerous waters of real freedom.

Lyra vows, having escaped the attention of Mrs Coulter and the Magisterium, to find her missing friend, Roger, and embarks, armed with her golden compass, on an adventure into a snowy parallel world just beyond the Northern Lights.

There her allies are a band of seafaring Gyptians, a witch called Serafina (Eva Green, who also narrates lest we get a bit lost in the plot turns), a Texas airship captain (Sam Elliott) and an alcoholic armoured bear called Iorek (voiced by Ian McKellen, who seems to pop up in every Hollywood fantasy as some sort of knightly icon). Lyra's enemies are legion but all manipulated by the evil Magisterium.

The fight between Iorek, who forswears drink and pledges himself to Lyra, and the evil bear determined to kill him and presumably eat her, is one of the special effects that works best. But the daemons are also quite something, with Lord Asriel's snow leopard and Mrs Coulter's monkey as effective as the bears and wolves on view.

Everyone cavorts in icy Northern landscapes that look as unreal as they actually seem when you visit them for yourself. But the screenplay puts the block on some of the human performances, which are cut off in their prime just as they seem to get going.

A little more humour also might have helped, and a few more pauses in the action to explain and underline Pullman's genuinely subversive purposes. "My books," he has said, are "all about killing God." One doesn't expect an epic with box-office to bear in mind to be anything like as forthright as that - such courage is at a premium these days. Or even for the film to acknowledge the influence of Milton's Paradise Lost (the source of the phrase "his dark materials"). But just a peek at the sterner stuff would have made a movie that's not at all bad into something better still.